Chapter Twenty-Three
Echo
I’m awake before the alarm goes off, staring at the ceiling while early morning sunlight spills through the gap in the curtains and stretches warm and golden across the room.
It pisses me off immediately.
The sky outside is painfully clear, bright blue beginning to replace the softer colors of dawn, and apparently the island has decided today deserves to be fucking beautiful.
After days of gray skies and unpredictable weather, the sun finally chooses this morning to show its face, warming the floorboards and catching on the edge of the blankets like there’s anything about today worth making pretty.
I stare at that strip of light longer than I should, anger tightening slowly through my chest.
Wolfe would’ve loved this.
He would’ve opened the curtains all the way, probably made some obnoxiously cheerful comment about finally getting decent weather before trying to drag the rest of us outside.
He was always chasing shit like this, always noticing the sun, the ocean, the trees, every little beautiful thing the rest of us walked past without thinking twice.
And now the fucking sun has the audacity to come out when he isn’t here to feel its warmth.
It shouldn’t make me this angry.
It does anyway.
For a few minutes, I don’t move, because the second I get out of bed, today becomes real.
The race is still happening. The paddock is still waiting. Wolfe’s family is here, and that fucking course is still out there like it didn’t already take enough from us.
The only thing missing is him.
Thorne is asleep beside me with one hand curled loosely around my wrist beneath the blanket, and Draygon is on my other side, turned partly onto his stomach with his knee pressed against mine. Neither of them looks properly rested.
None of us have really slept since Wolfe died, but eventually exhaustion wins whether grief agrees with it or not, and sometime after midnight we must have all finally passed out.
I look at Thorne’s fingers around my wrist and have to swallow before carefully easing myself free.
There are three of us in the bed.
I still haven’t figured out how to look at that without immediately knowing who should make four.
Today isn’t practice. There are no easy outs, no bringing everyone back into the bay after twenty minutes so they can complain about setup changes and argue over tire pressure. Today is the actual TT, the race we came all this way for, and none of us wants anything to do with it anymore.
That would almost be easier if Wolfe’s family weren’t here.
They flew in from Canada yesterday after the organizers told them there would be a tribute before today’s racing, and even knowing they came because their son died here makes something about packing up and leaving feel impossible.
Nobody has said we owe them a race. Andre has made it painfully clear that nobody owes anyone anything, especially Wolfe, but there is still something about his parents standing on this island, watching the event acknowledge him, that makes all of us feel like disappearing would be wrong in a different way.
I climb over Draygon, and pull on the first clothes I can find and head downstairs careful not to wake either of the guys.
The kitchen light is already on.
My father is standing at the counter in an old sweatshirt and sweatpants, waiting for the coffee machine to finish.
He glances over. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“Not really.”
“Same.”
He reaches for another mug without asking and sets it beneath the machine once his finishes.
That tiny gesture lands harder than it should, mostly because he doesn’t try to make anything else out of it.
He doesn’t ask how I’m feeling, doesn’t tell me today will be fine, and doesn’t give me some former-racer speech about courage or fear.
He just makes me coffee.
I lean my hip against the counter and watch him take a drink of his black enough that it looks like something I’d drain out of an engine.
“That’s disgusting.”
He looks down at the mug. “It’s coffee.”
“Yeah, bitter and nasty.”
He gives me a look that is so painfully Talon I almost mention it, then decide I don’t have the energy.
My cup finishes and he slides it over. I wrap both hands around it, mostly for the heat, while he settles against the opposite counter.
For a little while, neither of us says anything, and I’m grateful for that too. The rain fills the kitchen around us while the rest of the house stays quiet, and this is probably the closest thing to calm we’re getting today.
Eventually he pushes away from the counter.
“You’ll do great today.”
I look up. “Oh, I’m not racing.”
“I know.”
There’s something in his tone that tells me he isn’t talking about the start line.
He means with the bikes. With the guys. With getting through today and not falling apart every time one of them disappears onto the same course that took Wolfe.
I take a drink before my throat can close completely. “Thanks.”
He nods once, and that’s it.
By the time the rest of the house wakes, the little bit of quiet is gone.
Nobody talks much on the way to the paddock.
Revel tries once, muttering that anyone who schedules anything before sunrise should be publicly humiliated, but even he lets the joke die without trying to force another one behind it.
Cece sits beside him with her hand resting on his thigh, Bex is close to Talon and Sayshen, Lena has one arm looped through Reign’s, and Draygon and Thorne take the seats on either side of me without a word, close enough that I can feel the weight of them there.
The found-family thing used to feel like a phrase people put on book covers because it sounded nice.
Now I understand it better.
Family isn’t always something you recognize because you share blood or a last name. Sometimes it’s simply the people who stay, who make room for your grief without asking you to explain it, and who somehow know when to hold on and when to just sit beside you.
Sometimes it’s all of us packed together in silence, hurting in different ways but carrying the same loss.
The paddock is already awake when we arrive.
Officials move between bays with clipboards and headsets, mechanics roll equipment across the concrete, generators hum behind transporters, and somewhere farther down someone starts a bike that cracks through the morning air hard enough to make my chest seize before I can stop it.
Then I see Wolfe’s bay.
Nobody has put another motorcycle there. His setup board is gone, most of the equipment that belonged specifically to him has already been cleared, and all that remains is one clean stretch of concrete between the other bikes.
One empty space.
I don’t need anything else.
I set my bag down, pull my hair into a tighter knot and get to work.
Routine should help. Right? Normally it does.
Today, routine mutates into obsession so gradually I don’t realize I’m doing it until Reign catches me staring at the same tire-pressure reading for the third time.
I start with Talon’s bike, checking brake pressure, lever feel, controls, fluid, fasteners and suspension. Then I move to Sayshen’s and repeat the same sequence. Reign. Revel. Draygon. Thorne.
By the time I circle back to Talon, I know I’ve already checked everything that matters, but knowing isn’t enough anymore.
I squeeze his front brake lever again.
Check the reservoir.
Run my hand along the line.
Then I do it one more time.
When I reach Reign’s bike, he watches me crouch beside the front tire and stare at the gauge long enough that eventually he says, “You expecting it to change if you intimidate it?”
I glance up.
His face is exhausted, but there is the faintest edge of himself in there.
“It might.”
“It won’t.”
“Well, you never know.”
“It’s still thirty-one.”
I look at the gauge.
Thirty-one.
I write it down anyway.
By the time I reach Thorne’s bike, I’m halfway through checking a fastener I know I already torqued when a hand closes over mine.
I jerk my head up.
Andre is standing above me with that expression he gets when he already knows exactly what bullshit I’m about to try.
“Echo.”
“I’m checking it.”
“I can see that.”
“Then we’re both having a productive morning.”
His mouth doesn’t move. “You checked it ten minutes ago.”
“I could’ve missed something.”
“You didn’t.”
I pull my hand free and reach for the wrench.
Andre gets there first.
My jaw tightens. “Give me that.”
“No.”
“Andre.”
He crouches enough that we’re closer to eye level. His voice drops, not soft exactly, but steadier than everything around us. “You did your job.”
The sentence lands badly.
I look away.
He knows why.
“I heard that after Wolfe too.”
Andre’s expression changes, but he doesn’t flinch from it.
“I know.”
“And doing my job didn’t save him.”
“No.” He pauses, letting that sit instead of trying to erase it. “But his bike didn’t fail either.”
My fingers curl against my knee.
“You know that.”
“I know.”
“Then stop checking because you think the fifteenth time is going to give you control you never had.”
That pisses me off because it’s true.
I look back at him. “Are you done being emotionally intelligent? It’s really fucking unsettling.”
“Completely done.”
He hands the wrench back.
I take it.
“One more pass.”
“One.”
“Maybe one and a half.”
“Echo.”
“Fine.”
He walks away before I can renegotiate.
The next hour disappears into prep, briefings and the slow build of tension that settles over the paddock as the first start gets closer. By then, Wolfe’s family has arrived.
I recognize his mother before anyone tells me who she is.
She has his eyes.
That’s the first thing I notice, and it stops me harder than the empty bay did.
She’s standing beside a man I assume is his father, both of them wearing jackets against the morning sun, and there are two other people with them who must be family. They all look exhausted in the way people do when they have crossed an ocean for the worst reason possible.
Andre sees them first and walks over.
Talon and Sayshen follow.
Then the rest of us.